I recently received a copy of Real Basic for free. They are running a promotion to win over the abandoned VB6 users of the world.

I wasn’t exactly crying win it was announced that VB6 support would end, but I was very interested to see what RealBasic had to offer, and I am very impressed with it.

From a single set of source code you can compile binaries that run natively on Windows, Mac OS X, Mac Classic, and most implementations of x86 Linux. There is native support for API calls, and you can structure your calls to be platform specific.

For example, if you want to know the time interval that the OS says is the time between mouse clicks that it will consider to be a “double-click”:

#if targetMacOS then
 #if targetCarbon then
  Declare Function GetDblTime Lib "CarbonLib" () as Integer
 #else
  Declare Function GetDblTime Lib "InterfaceLib" () as Integer Inline68K("2EB802F0")
 #endif
 doubleClickTime = GetDblTime()
#endif

#if targetWin32 then
 Declare Function GetDoubleClickTime Lib "User32.DLL" () as Integer
 doubleClickTime = GetDoubleClickTime()
#endif

It also has a pluggable architecture, and there are several online repositories of free and commercial plug-ins.

Update: I have removed the screenshots, they were causing huge load times and sucking the life from my bandwith. You can find them at www.realbasic.com